We must do something, after all, to help save the gharial.

 oldviolin wrote: 

The two are intimately related in a whole complex of bad human behaviors that damage the natural world. Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is itself a form of pollution that (for instance) increases the acidity of the oceans, dooming coral reefs and associated ecosystems. Deforestation is not itself pollution, but is the destruction of (a) habitat for many, many animal and plant species, and (b) one of our main carbon sinks, the destruction of which makes a bad problem worse. *Etc., etc.* History will not judge us kindly if we do not act soon and act decisively to curb our bad habits.

"   c   l   i   m   a   t   e       i   s       g   e   t   t   i   n   g       w   a   r   m   e   r   "

My point was / is, that if we can address the realities of pollution in general, then the arguable pretensions of the effects of human attributes to climate change will be addressed. My opinion.

 oldviolin wrote: 

I honor the opinions of the scientists who make their lives' work the study of climate. The overwhelming majority of them agree on anthropogenic climate change. If you're going to disagree with this majority, you had better bring better arguments than those dealt with in the Scientific American article. Read the article!

 dionysius wrote: 
Pretty cut and dried. I honor your opinion. You must be emersed in the know...

 oldviolin wrote: 

There is no lack of consensus, really, The denial game is to manufacture a seeming lack of consensus. There is no equivalence between the two "sides" in this matter—one is right and the other simply wrong.

 dionysius wrote: 
The extreme politics played with lack of consensus among dissenting opinions.

 oldviolin wrote: 

What do you base your opinion on?

Bogus
Pollution however- very much human and serious

IMO of course...

From Scientific American, November 30th, 2009

Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense

Evidence for human interference with Earth's climate continues to accumulate

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 

MrsHobie,
Thanks for the links. The Guardian one was instructive: on the one hand, the emails were obtained illegally. Fair. But not a reasonable defense if the emails show a pattern of deception in order to massage data agreeable to preferred outcomes. Again, no defense in the scientific community can be offered if data is fudged or manipulated. On the other hand, The Guardian, or I should say the author of the article, points to the 3, perhaps 4, scientists caught up in a potentially explosive scam and ponders if that is the extent of this charade within the community that declares global warming an absolute. What is bothersome is that the lab where the deceit may have taken hold is one of the labs The UN leans on for guidance on the matter. From that guidance, come announcements of dread and doom: you have less than two hours before your skin's sloughing accelerates to an uncontrollable pace *I always snickered at the drop dead certainty of such tight time limits...40 days or 6 months or whatever time was set with such specificity* And then, no matter how or why the emails were obtained, we have a serious question on the 'hockey stick curve' the 'curve' Al Gore trumpets in his 'An Inconvenient Truth' as the last-brick-in-place that solidifies the certainty of global warming and by his endless and monotonous droning, ends the discussion and shoos away all skeptics or naysayers. Seems to me the emails now present an inconvenient moment.
mk

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 

From this here Torygraph: "The overwhelming majority of scientists believe the global warming is real and the result of human activity, but a vocal majority maintains that the science is not proven."

Two majorities? This...mistake...is FOXNoose-worthy. Almost missed it, because the brain reads the correct "minority" in passing. And, as we know, only minorities are vocal.

 musik_knut wrote: 
Flying post as I get through some domesic stuff.  Here are some reports from a couple of highly respected British newspapers at either end of the political spectrum.

From our newspaper of choice- The Guardian, which is left leaning, sandal wearing etc. We actually pay for it unlike some RP posters!!

From the right wing Daily Telegraph (known as the "Torygraph" in our household).

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 

This can only be seen as extremely damaging. It is from two British Labs that much of the certainty, a word used advisedly, on global warming, is drawn. Those two labs, as I understand it, are 2 of the 4 labs from which The UN makes an endless series of the  sky-is-falling declarations on the matter.

Manipulation of evidence:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?

Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I'll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

......Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back-I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to "contain" the putative "MWP", even if we don't yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back....

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

"This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the "peer-reviewed literature". Obviously, they found a solution to that-take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering "Climate Research" as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board...What do others think?"

"I will be emailing the journal to tell them I'm having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.""It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I've had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !"

 ~~~~~~~~~~~
Two that really caught my attention: the attempt to disguise the MWP, a period of considerably greater global temperatures than exist today. Since that period was well before the Industrial Revolution and with considerably fewer humans inhabiting Earth, we can't have that getting in the way. No, that would raise too many questions, which of course, it does. And then, to discuss how to circumvent peer review. An absolute NO NO in the science community. That is a real NO NO, not ever, ever, ever.

 musik_knut wrote: 

I did read some of the info this morning.  I said one email EXPOSE (ie the University of East Anglia expose).  I know you are a scientist.  I studied some of the scientific papers on climate change 20 years ago (only it was identified solely as rising sea level at that point) when I was taking my degree in Geography.  There is some discussion of events over the last few days in one of the global warming threads.  I agree that the information is damaging and very poor behaviour on the part of the scientists involved and some information has been discredited but you can't just take out the whole shooting match on that basis.

In fairness HJ will be better placed to discuss this later when he is around as I don't keep as up to date as he does and I don't get time to read as much information as him these days so I haven't followed every blow in the saga.

 MrsHobieJoe wrote: 

One email? Scores upon scores of emails. Some of them show concern that the climate is not acting as their fraudulent models and software predict. One email? Scores...
But don't take my word on this. I'm just making it up as I go along...not. That's not my way of reporting anything in the sciences...
If you read the emails (EMAILS as in scores), you find that the fraudulent attempts to phony up the data were well coordinated with political measures in mind.
As a scientist, I understand the severity of fudged data, or the manipulation of data to coax a predetermined outcome. Such activities are damned in the science community. As well they must be.

Following Bills advice I will just,,, 

 musik_knut wrote: 
Oh FFS.  One email expose does not "bust" over twenty years of scientific research.  You really need to see the politics and the science separately.